


Tuney's Song

by susabei



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Fan Soundtracks, Gen, Minor James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, POV Lily Evans Potter, Sister-Sister Relationship, Slice of Life, Songfic, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23789143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susabei/pseuds/susabei
Summary: Lily Evans has always had two constants in her life: her big sister and her music.
Relationships: Lily Evans & Petunia Evans, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Kudos: 7





	Tuney's Song

**Author's Note:**

> Written for round 2 of the QLFC, season 8!! Playing for the Wasps as the keeper babey!!
> 
> This round, I had to write about a character that has a lot of influence or control over someone.
> 
> Content warning for mention of death of parents.
> 
> Not as happy with this one, but I think I just wanted to write more tbh lmao, I cut out a lot of stuff. If you're interested, I made an accompanying playlist for this fic on Spotify! It's also called Tuney's Song!
> 
> Word count: 2,957

Lily Evans grows up with her father singing _Walkin' After Midnight_ to her as a baby. As she cries. As she fills her tiny lungs with air and the night with screams. It soothes her. Lulls her to sleep.

Tuney grows up with it too. She sings Pasty Cline with him in the allotment while they work. Cultivating life and beauty. She lifts up tomatoes to baby Lily's awed face and lets her reach out to touch them. To squeal in delight. As she grows, Lily doesn't work in the allotment with them, but rather plays and runs rampant around the rest of the garden, digging for worms and bothering sleeping stray cats, much to the amusement of her father and frustration of her sister. He says she's a free spirit and Tuney says she's a nuisance. 

Lily also grows up with her mother singing _The End of the World_ as she cleans the dishes, a cheerful timbre in her voice that doesn't manage to convince Lily that she's not as melancholy as the song would let on. She pulls at her mother's pants and insists that she loves her. She loves her so much, she will never stop loving her. Tuney tells her she's being dumb, that Mum isn't singing to her, but she won't listen. She just begs Tuney to never stop loving their mother either. And all she can do is agree.

Tuney doesn't break out into song like their parents do. Tuney has to have a tune playing before she even _considers_ humming. Or another person to join her. Lily knows, because she's tried. Has started out with a swing in her step and a song in her heart and attempted to pull Tuney into the moment with her. Naturally, Tuney has none of it. More so when she's in a mood. She rolls her eyes and tells Lily to stop it now, even with a smile tugging at her face. Lily loves that smile. She keeps trying. Wanting to see it bloom.

It's rare when she's successful.

That's not to say that Tuney doesn't like music, obviously. She has Dean Martin records in a milkcrate by her bed, taken care of and loved. Given to her by aunts and her mother. A precious collection of heirlooms. Lily crawls in beside her on bad nights when she has her nightmares or when their parents are fighting, and they listen to _Innamorata_ while Tuney sighs and Lily drifts off to sleep, Tuney's fingers gently brushing her scalp. Lily's ear, held up to her sister's chest, listens to the pleasant vibrating hum of her sister's voice as the notes string along. It is a sacred practice that Lily's sure is unique only to them in the whole wide world.

Sometimes Lily finds other records in Tuney's milkcrate. Temptations and Beach Boys and Neil Sedaka. Tame albums that Lily listens to on days she stays home sick from school, laying on the floor of their shared bedroom and staring up at their ceiling. Her sister puts up such a fuss when she gets home, seeing that Lily's gone through her things, but _oh,_ Lily's so happy to see her back, how can she stay mad? Well, she does, until dinner, but after that, she sits down with Lily and they discuss which Beatle they're going to marry. Lily likes John but Tuney likes George. Says there's a softness about him. After that, Lily likes George too.

Sometimes Lily finds records _not_ in Tuney's crate. In the middle of the Hide-and-Seek Championship of 1966, Lily is buried deep in their bedroom closet and she brushes up against an album with big, red, bold letters saying KINKS, and another one with AFTERMATH on a black and pink photographic background, and when she asks Tuney about them, her sister gives out a shrill denial and hits Lily's arm, snatching the foreign records out of her small hands.

She doesn't find any more records in the closet after that, but she does find a new hiding spot for when she builds her own secret collection. Jimi Hendrix and The Mothers of Invention and The Zombies. Garage bands who sold their cassettes through their younger siblings in primary school: Lily splurges on them all. As much as she can get her hands on—A collection to be proud of. A collection that's all hers—is it as big as Tuney's? She wants to show her so desperately. To impress her. _I can be like you!_ She'll say.

Tuney says she's a copycat. That she's taking away what makes _her_ special and interesting. All while still denying those records she had found in the closet

Lily protests and screams and cries as her mother takes _Velvet Underground & Nico_ away from her. She tells her that Lou Reed is an English major and all the songs he wrote aren't any different from how nasty Shakespere gets (Tuney scoffs here). And Mum sighs and agrees to at least _listen_ to the album but it doesn't go as planned. When her mother hears the opening notes of a music box and the strangely distant, drawn out, echoed voice singing about a Sunday morning, she doesn't hear the depth. When a man sings about waiting for his man with money in hand or a woman sings about a girl of a less reputable nature, Mum doesn't hear what Lily hears. She tuts and says that she's too young to be hearing songs about sex and drugs and women like that. _But it's not about that!!_ That's the shallow interpretation. The one the whole world projects on the songs without really listening.

 _But Tuney..._ Tuney listened. Lily could tell. She knows her sister, she knows her sister better than anyone else on this whole planet and she listened. Tuney's so smart, she's going to change the world. Tuney argues with her teachers about the text they place in their books and the lessons they give to their classes. Tuney fights with their father on his political stances and sometimes even _makes_ him hear her argument. Tuney protects her against her playground bullies until Lily is old enough to start throwing her own punches.

She listened to her music, and she understood. Even if she stayed silent and huffing throughout it all, she did.

But Tuney...Tuney still scoffs at the rock albums Lily brings home and publically sticks to her Carpenters and Frank Sinatra albums for her source of entertainment. And Lily loves them too. _We've Only Just Begun_ and _I'm A Fool To Want You_ move her soul just as much as _Venus in Furs_ and _War Pigs_ does. But what use is it to close yourself off to so much beauty? Because Tuney's friends scoff at it? Her older, mature friends who look at Lily and see a scruffy little kid with dirt on her nose and scabs on her knees? Is it worth their approval if she no longer dances with Lily when _I Saw Her Standing There_ comes on the radio? Is it worth the hours of laughter and entertainment given to them through their dance sessions and sing-alongs? They're both horrendous, of course, no one can deny that, but they did it with such passion. _Don't Hurt My Little Sister_ was once sung with such genuine feeling that Lily suspected Tuney identified with it deeply…

Tuney's friends don't listen to the music that Lily does— _Really, she's not sure if they listen to music at all,_ and it worries Lily to death that one day she's going to find that Tuney threw out all of her old records in favour of silence.

But just once, Lily catches her humming _House of the Rising Sun_ as she washes the dishes. And Lily knows that despite everything, it's not too late. Her sister is there and she's still hers. She'll look in the milkcrate and still see Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

She slips a Monkees album under Tuney's bed-covers on her birthday and unlike previous gifts, Lily does not find it flung in the garbage. Instead, weeks later, Lily finds the album _At San Quentin_ under her pillow as Tuney pretends to sleep in the bed a few meters away from her. When Lily asks her about it, she says she doesn't know what she's talking about and calls her _stupid._

For a while, they continue these exchanges. This secret language they've developed without speaking. Even through Severus severing their closeness and Lily clinging to him, their growing collection hidden in the back of their closet grows. Tuney hands her one _Blonde on Blonde_ album and Lily gives back _Astral Week_ several weeks later _._ Their allowance, so meager, can only afford so many new (and often old) pieces of music. But it's worth it. Tuney will always be worth it.

Even when she starts calling her a freak.

Severus listens to the music Lily shows him, but it doesn't interest him. None of it does. He's tainted by his father's fondness for Doris Day, and so he simply refuses to listen to _Muggle music_ as he calls it. Tuney scoffs and calls him pretentious, and Lily defends him with fervor, despite agreeing with her sister. Secretly. She'll never tell him so. In her moments as an adult, she'll wonder if she should have. If she should have listened to Tuney on a lot of things.

When Lily starts Hogwarts, she brings her music with her. Compares collections with Mary MacDonald and Marlene Mckinnon (they dream about their own record company one day: _MLM_ records, though the two argue over whose name goes first)--And she's able to convert them to her harder sounds and experimental tunes. Sway them to the older generations of folk songs and swing. So much so that she grabs the attention of some of the purebloods (Sirius Black is the first of them she converts with _Visions of Johanna._ It's a beautiful first impression before it's ruined completely by James Potter's shitty take on it). She's not just Mudblood Evans, she's Fermata Evans: holding her place in spaces hostile to her much longer than she's wanted. Just long enough to leave her mark.

Lily writes about it in her letters to Tuney that never get responses. That Dorcas Meadows loved this and Regan Prewett loved that. That there's a witch here in Hufflepuff that Lily thinks would get along _splendidly_ with her sister. That they have the same taste in music and everything. That even _freaks_ like them have a connection with Tuney. The message is clear _we can still be sisters. Please still be my sister._

Tuney still throws her _freaks_ and _sideshows_ at Lily, but when she comes home over Winter Holiday, she finds _Bitches Brew_ in her sock drawer, and somehow it's the greatest underhanded compliment she's ever received. Tuney's not lost. She'll never be lost. Lily swears it. She'll die before her sister is lost.

Every rare and sparse piece of music given to her after Hogwarts is hoarded. Even if the album gets damaged.

New music is sparse after Lily goes to Hogwarts. The all consuming world of magic demands her whole attention and love. Commands her to leave behind the useless world of the mundane and Muggle—what use does she have of maths outside of rune structures and arithmancy? Why should she know about Bloody Sunday and the turmoils of her country and neighbours when The Goblin Wars shaped modern Magical Britain's economy? The only news she receives from the outside world is through the music she smuggles in, with anti-war messages and calls to action. The papers Petunia writes for her classes and job on the paper (shared with her through their mother, Tuney never writes). The ancient radio that Mary manages to make pick up BBC.

_(Over and over, her pureblooded compatriots, even half-bloods like Severus, show bemusement at her behaviour. Her insistence on retaining this piece of her Muggle heritage. They all tell her that it's more likely that she'll marry a wizard anyways. Move away from her Muggle family. Start a magical job, until she falls pregnant of course. There's few alterations on the story (some of the more progressive ones tell her she'll move away on her own without a husband or children, but they still say that she'll leave Muggledom behind)._

_It fuels her desire for the exact opposite._

_Lily wants her degree. To see her old primary school friends (she had so few to begin with, all she needed was Tuney) and have a high school education. She will not be swallowed up by the world of magic. She will be the bridge between them...She will be remembered on_ **_both_ ** _sides._

_Even if the Wizarding World is insistent on keeping her.)_

The few records Lily manages to be gifted by Tuney always end up in the same place: on an ancient gramophone in the Gryffindor girls' dormitory that Marlene swears up and down is older than her grandmother. It was love at first sight for Lily, whose electronic Magnavox was not only too big to transport without performing underage wizardry, but also wouldn't work within the hallowed halls of Hogwarts. Together, the future owners of _MLM_ records dust off the reliquary and crank it up.

It's mad fun. Singing _Rhiannon_ at the top of her lungs with the other Muggleborns, dancing and kicking out her feet without a single care in the world. It is a jarring difference to how the girl's dormitory will look later that same day after Severus calls her _mudblood._

Tuney isn't there to tell her _I told you so_ , but Lily hears it in her head anyways.

When Lily starts finding local toerag, James Potter _fit,_ she hears Tuney's voice in her head as well. _Another one?_ It says. _He's worse than Severus. At least he had direction._

But Tuney doesn't understand. There's so few things that she understands nowadays. Why Lily doesn't like her boyfriend. Her career choice (a secretary? A waste of her skill and pure talent). Her new attitude towards _normalcy._ Can't her sister see it's killing her? Her spirit and soul?

Lily bets she can't even remember the lyrics to _Daydream Believer._

James doesn't know the lyrics either, but he tries. Listens to the album with Lily wrapped up in his arms, making up silly lyrics instead of singing along to the real verses. He laughs but relents when Lily elbows him to stop. He never takes anything seriously. Maybe that's why she likes him. He's a wonderful distraction from the mundane. From the upsetting reality surrounding them. From her sister's estrangement. From the death of her mother.

The death of their mother takes its toll on them both. Lily can't listen to music for two months, even looking at her records and cassettes makes her sick. The radio in her father's old buick remains silent, even through her favourite talk radio shows and needed traffic reports. Her showers are no longer impromptu conciertos for one and there is no more dancing in the middle of shopping for groceries. Silence is her comfort. 

It's Tuney that gets her back to where she belongs. Three months after their mother's death, twelve weeks after her mother's funeral, Lily walks into the kitchen of her parents' house and finds her sister washing the dishes, humming Skeeter Davis under her breath. And Lily cries. She cries in the middle of the kitchen in her knitted jumper and all she wants to do is sing along but she can't. She can't bring herself to and all she can do is cry and watch as Tuney turns in surprise and instinctively rushes to her rescue. Just like she used to. When Lily's playground bullies would pull at her hair and push her down into patches of nettles. When the boys she liked would seethe and tell her she was gross and had the dreaded lurgi. She hadn't even embraced her like that at Mum's funeral—preferring to keep her distance and mourn in private. Tuney shooshes Lily and smooths down her hair. The first hug given to her in six years.

It is also the last hug.

Lily isn't there for their father's second stroke. Nor is she there for his funeral (they don't let Muggleborns just leave Hogwarts, especially not with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named out and about. Tuney buries their father next to their mother on an unusually sunny November day. Only three years later, she'll find herself burying her sister as well. Only one year later, she'll be getting married.

The song Tuney walks down the aisle to is _Bridal Chorus_ by Richard Wagner—traditional, just like she had been dreaming of since about three or four years ago, when she met perfectly-mundane-and-boring and _safe_ Vernon Dursley. A far cry from the original song she wanted at age seven, _As Long As She Needs Me_. Lily walks down the aisle to _Something_ , because George Harrison is still her favourite Beatle. Tuney is not there to tell the guests the story about how _she_ had liked George first, before Lily ever thought of him. That, as usual, her sister stole and copied everything from her.

They both have their first dance to _In the Chapel In the Moonlight._

In 1980, after the birth of her nephew, Lily Potter sends Tuney a mixtape of songs. Something she dismisses as a tripe gift and stows away in a junk drawer—but listens to in secret, in silence, on the night of November 1st, 1981, with her son and nephew. The first song she hears after the death of her sister.

The first song listened together by Dudley Dursley and Harry Potter is _Danny's Song._ It soothes them. Lulls them to sleep.


End file.
